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I am looking for a textbook that helps me understand how basic digital electronic units are used to build complicated integrated circuits.

I have looked online for textbooks, but what I have found tends to be either

  1. At a level of abstraction below what I'm looking for: textbooks on the nitty gritty electrical engineering aspects of circuits. They tend to have hundreds of pages on how a transistor even works. Example: Foundations of Analog and Digital Circuits by Agarwal and Lang.

  2. At a level of abstraction above what I'm looking for: textbooks that take "operations" and functional units as the basic units. E.g. they take the existence of an ALU as given, without explaining, in detail, how to make an ALU out of components like AND gates and flip-flops. They tend to emphasize programming language concepts rather than actual digital circuits and signals. Example: Modern Processor Design by Shen and Lipasti

Both of these are interesting of course. But I'm looking for a textbook that goes into the basic components of a microchip, abstracting away from the most nitty gritty physical implementation, but while capturing the basic low level details of micro chip design.

I want to basically know how AND, OR, gates etc, and flip flops, and clock signal (and whatever other units there might be) are used to create cache memory, ALU's, to make sure that the circuit is synchronized etc.

I am not sure what keywords I should be looking for to find such a textbook.

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    $\begingroup$ Is searching for “digital logic design” helpful? I found this online textbook american.cs.ucdavis.edu/academic/ecs154a.sum14/postscript/… $\endgroup$
    – user46107
    Commented Feb 16, 2020 at 19:21
  • $\begingroup$ You might need two steps in there -- how to make gates from transistors, and how to make computational circuits from gates. $\endgroup$
    – user115736
    Commented Feb 17, 2020 at 0:05
  • $\begingroup$ @danielMGessel, yeah I think that might be what I'm looking for (at least the first part of it. I'm also looking for how large ebtities like ALU's and entire pipelines are made of the component parts. $\endgroup$
    – user56834
    Commented Feb 17, 2020 at 4:57
  • $\begingroup$ @another-dave, do those two separate topics have names, so that if I google them I'll find textbooks on them? $\endgroup$
    – user56834
    Commented Feb 17, 2020 at 4:58

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